FORWARD OPERATING BASE JACKSON, Afghanistan (AP) — An American in
uniform stands near a landing zone at about 2 a.m., moonlight framing
his features, and talks about dead and maimed men he knows. His flight
out isn't until next month, and he is counting the days.

Then he says he will miss Afghanistan.

"It's
just life or death: the simplicity of it," said Cpl. Robert Cole of the
1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, which ends a seven-month deployment
in the southern region of Sangin in October. "It's also kind of nice in
some ways because you don't have to worry about anything else in the
world."

The dominant narrative about war in a foreign land says
its practitioners yearn for home, for the families, the comforts, and
the luxury of no longer worrying about imminent death or injury. It
applies to young American troops in Afghan combat zones, but it's not
the whole truth.

Combat can deliver a sense of urgency, meaning,
order and belonging. There is the adrenaline-fueled elation of a
firefight, and the horror of rescuing a comrade wounded by a bomb on
patrol. It is magnified, instantaneous experience. An existence boiled
down to the essentials mocks the mundane detritus, the quibbles and
bill-paying and anonymity, of life back home.

Building on the
costly inroads of a previous unit, the Marine battalion has seen a
decline in Taliban attacks in Sangin, a southern Afghan area where the
insurgency battled British forces to a stalemate for years. Now the
troops have more time to build bridges and sluice gates, and sit
cross-legged at meetings with Afghan elders in hopes of stripping the
insurgency of popular support.

Early on, the going was hard. Cole
said his platoon suffered close to 30 percent casualties, mostly from
bombs hidden around its patrol base.

He described how one Marine
on patrol triggered a bomb that severed his legs. Another Marine rushed
forward to apply tourniquets, knowing his friend would bleed to death if
he methodically checked, as training dictated, for more boobytraps in
his path. The second Marine started dragging the first toward safety
when he set off another bomb, severing his own legs, according to Cole.
But he saved his comrade in the process.

"He didn't lose his legs
for his country, he lost his legs for his brother," Cole, of Klamath
Falls, Oregon, said bluntly. He gestured to another Marine in the dark
at the landing zone at Forward Operating Base Jackson, the battalion's
headquarters.

"The only shred of sanity that keeps us going out
here is that I have to protect his ass and he has to protect my ass,"
said Cole, who is confined to the base after suffering concussions in
two explosions.

Cole, 22, is not bitter. He treasures the fierce
loyalty, born of bloodshed. Politics, the debate about the wisdom of the
decade-long U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the plan to withdraw
international combat forces by the end of 2014, seem irrelevant to young
Marines.

When they talk about friends with amputated limbs under
treatment in the United States, they often stick to the line, "he's
doing really good right now," even if they know that isn't true.

"Get
some!" is a Marine slogan, reflecting the U.S. military branch's
traditional taste for expeditionary action. On the night of Sept. 11,
possibly to mark the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks in the
United States, insurgents fired on guard posts at the Jackson camp. It
was harassment, not a major attack. Marines returned fire in great
volume, red tracer rounds plunging into the darkness.

"Watch your
sectors!" warned a company captain as some Marines, adrenaline
unleashed, broadened their sweep of fire from defensive berms. After a
while, the shooting subsided. One Marine was asked: Is it over?

"I have no clue," he laughed. "They can fire at us all night if they want, as long as nobody gets hurt."

At
Patrol Base Fulod, about a 15-minute ride in an armored vehicle from
the Jackson camp, Cpl. Ernest Tubbs is something special among his
peers. He has discovered three-dozen hidden bombs on this deployment. A
smooth talker who radiates confidence, he remembered the first time he
uncovered an IED, or improvised explosive device, "heart racing, so many
emotions at one time."

Tubbs, 22, of Parsonsburg, Maryland, leads
patrols with a metal detector, potentially the most dangerous job in
the lineup. In a small victory celebration, he smokes a cigarette
whenever he finds an IED; he smoked two in a row after one very
hazardous experience.

He is desperate to return to his wife and
newborn son, and become a civilian, but he won't forget what it is like
to be a kind of savior, to know men depend on him for their lives.

"The
feeling of when things happen out here, it's a feeling that you'll
never get rid of. But it's a feeling that will always belong to you," he
said. "There's no more adrenaline rush in the world than finding an
IED. I'm going to miss that a bunch."

For families in the United
States, there are no such thrills, only the grind of not knowing. Tubbs'
wife, Hannah, gave birth to a boy, Gabe, last month. Her husband's
oldest brother cut the umbilical cord. In an e-mail to The Associated
Press, she wrote:

"Even when I was still pregnant with him I would
tell him that his daddy loves him and can't wait to meet him. I tell
him who his daddy is and all about him. Being pregnant for most of the
deployment didn't help the emotional part of it all. It was hard getting
ready for the baby without him. It was even harder to hear about guys
who had been hurt or even killed knowing they did the same job as my
son's father."

She continued: "His best friend is a triple amp
(amputee) and another lost his life, he had not even been married a
year. We kept in touch with his wife and she plans on being at the
homecoming. There are no words that describe what families go through
during a deployment. The days drag on when there is no phone call and
your heart drops when there is an unexpected knock on the door."

Various
books, films and television series address the theme of troops liking
aspects of war, or missing it when they get home. Many focus on the
sacrifice, the brotherhood, or the bloodshed, or some combination.
Norman Mailer's novel, "The Naked and the Dead," and the 1998 movie
"Saving Private Ryan" are among works that explore the psychological
impact of intense combat on its protagonists.

"It is well that war
is so terrible — otherwise we would grow too fond of it," U.S.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee reportedly said at the Battle of
Fredericksburg on Dec. 13, 1862.

Some transitions to home are the hardest of all.

Walking
past cornfields on a patrol, 1st Lt. Richard Marcantonio of Corpus
Christi, Texas, talked about a Marine who lost three limbs in a bombing
and was transferred to a military hospital in the United States. One
day, his father walked in and handed his son's baby to him as he lay in
bed.

According to Marcantonio, the father said something like:
"Here's your child. I'm not going to bring her up, so you better do it."

And, this story of tough love goes, the Marine is doing just that.

Some
who come from rural areas in the United States feel a curious affinity
with Afghanistan and its web of sparsely populated villages and
farmland. Capt. Brian Huysman of Delphos, Ohio — "Good luck finding
Delphos on the map," he said — sees parallels between the "small town
mentality" and rivalries back home and the jostling for advantage among
local leaders in southern Afghan settlements.

"It's very eerie," said Huysman, Weapons Company commander for the battalion.

When
these men are retired veterans, many will look back on Afghanistan as a
place of loss, but also a place that made them better than they were,
whether the U.S. military succeeds in its long-term goals or not. The
cult of sacrifice finds expression in a shrine to the missing in action
of past wars in the dining hall at Camp Leatherneck, the main Marine
base in southern Afghanistan.

There, an empty chair sits in front
of a table laid with white cloth and a place setting for one. On the
bread plate, a notice says, a slice of lemon symbolizes their "bitter
fate," and salt stands for families' tears. There are dog tags and an
inverted drinking glass.

Cole, the corporal at the landing zone,
said that in his time in Sangin, he had seen Taliban fighters only once,
in a treeline hundreds of yards (meters) away, too far to fire on them
accurately. Marines called for an air strike, but it was denied because
there were children in the area. International forces have "rules of
engagement" designed to avoid civilian casualties.

As Cole talked,
the dark mass of an Osprey aircraft rumbled inward, its lights off to
make it less of a target for insurgents. The back ramp was open, a
tethered gunner at the edge with a mounted machine gun.

Dust and wind swirled, tossed up by churning rotors. The courteous corporal pulled a departing passenger into a half-embrace.